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Now that you're fully onboarded and immersed in Dragon's Dogma 2 and its quirkiness, it's time to talk about the elephant in the room: it sure as heck looks beautiful, but we also get to pay the performance malus for this beauty. Capcom's RE engine - which Dragon's Dogma 2 runs on - has proven its value time and again in smaller-scale Metroidvania-esque experiences. Even Monster Hunter World's semi-open worlds have performed well on the RE engine, it's true, but Dragon's Dogma 2 is a wholly different beast, and it does not run well.
We're not being cheeky here, either: Capcom has already acknowledged the game's problematic performance, promising fixes down the line: "A large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and calculating the impact of their physical presence in various areas. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate. We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future."
In other words, we're looking at one of the most CPU-bottlenecked games we've seen in years, which means your GPU won't be the be-all-end-all that it is in most other games. Let's go over the potential tweaks and performance recommendations, then!
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How to Tweak Dragon's Dogma 2 on PC?
Here's the simple truth as of March 23: there is no PC hardware in existence at this time that will run Dragon's Dogma 2 without stuttering and performance drops. As per the thorough testing conducted by Digital Foundry, Capcom's long-anticipated flagship delivers fairly shoddy performance almost across the board. Whereas consoles run it at sub-30 FPS when push comes to shove, PCs can crank things up a fair bit higher at the cost of latency spikes and a less overall stable average FPS. You can read more about what this means, exactly, in our low-end PC gaming optimization guide.
Due to the nature of the game's key bottleneck: the handling of large numbers of NPCs via the processor/CPU, the cities are extremely inconsistent performance-wise in Dragon's Dogma 2, even if you're outfitted with the ridiculously powerful Ryzen 7 7800X3D and the RTX 4090. There's just no avoiding it. Thankfully, the vast majority of the action does not take place in a city in this game, and you should be able to get a fairly decent playing experience for most of your time here.
Here's the full list of graphics options you have access to on PC:
You will, of course, gain a moderate performance improvement if you drop as much stuff as possible onto lower settings. Raytracing, in particular, is a point of contention but having seen what a transformative effect global illumination has on the image quality, we recommend keeping RT on if at all possible. The effect is simply phenomenal.
The sad truth, though, is that there's simply no avoiding performance drops at this time, and you will face frame rate issues no matter what you do. To that end, we do recommend toggling some of the graphics settings up or down a few notches, but achieving a rock-solid performance baseline is simply impossible at this time. Do stay tuned for an update as Capcom pushes out optimizations for the game, however.
Finally, for Nvidia RTX 4000 owners, there's one last thing we must recommend: give PureDark's DLSS3 enabler a shot. As it currently stands, Dragon's Dogma 2 supports the supersampling component of DLSS 3.0 but there is no frame generation support of any kind. As frame generation/interpolation is handy specifically when there's a CPU bottleneck in place, this is a good way of side-stepping at least some of DD2's current performance issues, until Capcom can alleviate them to some extent.
One thing to note, of course, is that you're still going to have problems with spiking frame times and latency bumps - there's just no avoiding those. They should at least be less visually jarring if you can get frame interpolation running, however, so we recommend giving this a shot. Good luck!
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